Bark: Rants about the world in general.
Byte: Rants about videogames, technical matters and the IT Industry.
Hence, Bark and Byte.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Byte: It's enough to make you want to buy a Mac

So, I'm working from home today and I think "oh, this would be a nice opportunity to dual-boot my games rig with the lovely new version of Ubuntu." Y'know, I'm a geek, and I like Linux, because it's just so much more friendly, stable and less likely to get infected by viruses and the like. Okay, it can be a pain to set up, but Hardy Heron has a lovely new installer that even works from within Windows. So this is going to be a breeze, thinks I... Of course, WRONG.

I should have known better from my last attempt at installing Ubuntu on my games rig that it seriously hates SLI architecture, and it would appear, RAID arrays... Of course, I didn't find this out until the installer nuked my RAID array and wiped out all the data on it. Terrific. Not that there was a huge amount of critical stuff on it, just a few photos and save games, but very annoying nonetheless. Even more annoying, since the one disk that went missing from my Big Box of Things I Need To Reinstall Windows From Scratch was the goddamn RAID controller disk.

Congratulations, you're now in the proud possession of the world's largest and most expensive paperweight!

And of course, the Ubuntu Live CD didn't want to work with my wireless network, so I didn't have any way of creating a new RAID controller driver disk, since none of my other computers have floppy drives, as they're modern laptops... Double terrific.

Fortunately, one of my neighbours happened to have a USB floppy drive, so I'm now having the pleasure of spending my evening reinstalling Windows and all the multitude of drivers and programs you need to make it a working, non-virus/spyware ridden zombie that runs slower than a 386, despite it costing over £1000 and having enough raw computing power to cure cancer in five seconds...

And that's before we can even think about reinstalling Steam, WoW (and all the patches... urk) and the rest of my games. Not exactly how I'd planned to spend my evening, really.